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Skepticism Abounds After $7 Million BitTorrent Token Sold Out In Minutes

A public sale of roughly 60 billion BitTorrent(BTT) was completed in under 20 minutes on Jan.28 on the leading crypto exchange Binance’s in-house initial coin offering (ICO) platform, Launchpad, raising about $ 7 million worth of Tron(TRX) and Binance Coin(BNB) tokens and causing quite a stir within the crypto community.

Beginning at 3:00 pm, Jan.28(UTC), the token sale platform opened the door to BTT investors through two simultaneous sessions,the TRX session and the BNB session. According to Binance, the BNB session sold 23.76 billion BTT to 340 participants within 13 minutes and 25 seconds, while the TRON session saw the sale of 35.64 billion BTT to 622 participants within 14 minutes and 41 seconds.

The public sale allocation of BTT ( 59.4 billion tokens) accounts only 6 percent of a whopping 990 billion total supply. With one BTT token priced at $0.00012, Binance’s most recent Launchpad sale raked in around $7.2 million.

BTT is a native token introduced by the world’s largest peer-to-peer(P2P) file sharing network BitTorrent, which was acquired by the contentious blockchain startup Tron last year. Based on Tron blockchain, BTT is designed to improve the speed the popular file-sharing platform and to encourage seeders to seed files longer.

Skepticism Abounds

Binance CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao(CZ) believed the public sale could have ended much earlier if not for a technical glitch with the Launchpad platform.

“Both sessions concluded. Took about 18 minutes, due to a system issue, would have taken 18 seconds otherwise. Demand was astronomical,” CZ tweeted.

But considering the large amount of BTT tokens were snatched up by a relative small pool of investors, skepticism about the transparency of the ICO event arose although CZ claimed on Twitter that “Full transparency. The issue experienced today was caused by the ‘user agreement confirmation’button caching/locking” .

A Twitterer named Milos Tamajka said “this is not transparency”, and it seems someone controlled who could participate in the sale event.

The much hyped ICO disappointed many TRX holders who placed place orders but couldn’t get them filled. They also cast doubt about the compensation the Tron team has promised to give to those who failed to buy BTT in the public sale.

Moreover, concern over the long-lasting BTT airdrop is bubbling up. As of today, more than 10 major crypto exchanges and digital asset wallet providers, including Binance,OKEX,Huobi and Gate.io, Bithumb, Bitpie Wallet, have announced their support for the BTT airdrop to TRX holders, which is scheduled to start on February 11th,2019 and is set to continue till February 2025 with allocations dispersed yearly. The airdrop is in the ratio of 1 TRX to 0.11 BTT

The Tron team, which has long been criticized for rambunctious approach to marketing, intends to use the 6-year BTT airdrop plan to keep the interest of traders and investors in both TRX and BTT till 2025. But Will BTT be worth anything in 6 years considering the massive supply? Will TRX still exist in 2025?

The crazy ICO, however, fails to drive up TRX price this time. The price of TRX, the eighth largest crypto by market cap, plunges to $0.0264 at press time, down 4.08% over the past 24 hours, according to coinmarketcap. And a lot of TRX holders dumped TRX after they failed to buy BTT.

Investors, most of them speculators, flock to buy BTT because they think there is a godd chance for the price of BTT to double when it gets listed on the crypto exchange as Binance and marketing genius Justin Sun, founder and CEO of Tron Foundation, strongly backs the tocken. But we will have to wait and see if BTT will disappoint both users and investers.